by T. H. Moore
He crouched out of sight, hoping she wouldn’t give him away.
Charles closed his eyes and cursed Eloah’s indifference, her detached sensibilities, and her lack of empathy for this world she had created.
Then he opened his eyes and felt new determination. He was not lost. He would control his own destiny. He would not be at anyone’s hand—not even Eloah’s.
The main fight raged on. Screams pierced through the crowd, signaling the untold havoc the two women were wreaking upon each other to secure temporary clemency from the loser’s circle. One of the women threw the other onto her back. Dust rose into a cloud above them.
“Get up, or I’ll have you pinned to your back until your final days,” the handler of the losing woman threatened.
His threat reignited the fight in her. She screamed out in a rage, and fought her way off her back and to her knees. It was clear that she was using every bit of energy she had left, but her recovery was temporary, and her opponent the better fighter. Seconds later, she was back on the ground, being pummeled without mercy with fists, elbows, and forearms landing in panicked, rapid succession.
In this K-City barnyard ring, there were no bells to signal fighters to their corners. The stronger woman kept on with her beating, and finally the weaker woman lay motionless.
Charles hoped she wasn’t dead but wondered if it might be better if she were.
The Irishman pulled the heaving woman from her opponent. The winning men thrust their fists in the air. The losers complained, spat, and threatened the unconscious woman.
Charles decided he’d seen enough. He started backing along the windmill platform toward the ladder, then paused when he saw another woman being led out on a leash by a man whose face he couldn’t see.
“You sons of bitches ready for me yet?” the man bellowed.
Charles knew that voice. He looked down to spot Donato swaggering and hitching his pants. The crowd parted enough for Charles to see Elaina with barbed wire wound around her neck. Speckled rings of blood lined her shirt.
Charles recalled the last thing he had told her, that her beauty would be her curse here. He felt a flicker of remorse—an unfamiliar emotion to him—that his prediction had come true as he saw her having to follow Donato around like his pet. The bounce in Donato’s step made it apparent that he had just raped her. Charles could guess from her sagging face and shoulders how many times she’d had to endure such brutality.
“Is it time for my bitch to fight?” Donato yelled again as they breached the large circle, where happy men were gathering their winnings and the groggy loser, too broken to protest, was being dragged off to the rape circle by her financiers. Donato positioned Elaina to one side of the circle and peered across to the opposite side, where her opponent crouched, waiting.
A fight broke out among the men, and the ginger-haired ringleader looked over the crowd. “Pay what you owe!”
One man grabbed a crudely-honed knife from his sock.
When the larger man saw the weapon, he laughed, his smile gummy from lost teeth. “What you gonna do with that, little man?” he taunted.
“Nnamdi, we have a dispute!” the redheaded ring announcer shouted. When the Nigerian enforcer didn’t come, the announcer scanned the crowd again. “Nnamdi!”
The Nigerian had gone off to the rape circle and barged ahead in line to have his way with the previous fight’s loser. His face was intense as he ignored her cries.
Another man who’d been counting at the Nigerian’s elbow paused and snickered. “Sucks to be you, my friend, but looks like they need you over there.”
Even from Charles’s vantage point, the Nigerian brute was so broad that he eclipsed the woman beneath him.
“Hey,” another eager rapist said, “McLaughlin needs you. Two men are fighting over wagers.”
Nnamdi ignored them. He took a quick glance up at the larger circle to see two men brandishing weapons as they circled and took swipes at each other. Then he went back to thrusting into the woman beneath him. “After I’m finished,” he snarled.
Charles saw movement as, with the grace and focus of a lion, a huge man slipped through the crowd. The unsuspecting Nnamdi never saw what hit him until it was too late. The man threw one of his massive arms around Nnamdi’s throat. The Nigerian gasped for air and grabbed at the tattooed bicep of the imposing forearm. From the fear in his eyes, it seemed clear to Charles that the Nigerian knew he was outmatched. He struggled to look over his shoulder to see who his attacker was.
“Kristoff?” Nnamdi gasped. His arms fell limp to his sides, and he collapsed onto the woman under him. His scarred knuckles scraped the ground and saliva dripped from the sides of his mouth onto her bare chest.
“Every stroke you steal delays the fight, the bets, my winnings,” Kristoff said, each syllable angrier than the one before. Kristoff reached down and unfastened his worn cargo pants to pull out a raging erection stained with dry, yellow pus. He inhaled deeply through his nostrils and spat into his course palm a mixture of mucus and saliva that he wiped between Nnamdi’s buttocks.
Before he could start, Kristoff looked at the ravaged woman lying under Nnamdi. “Fight or fuck,” he ordered the woman half-trapped beneath Nnamdi.
She worked her body free and ran off towards her handler.
As Kristoff thrust himself into the Nigerian’s backside, Nnamdi snapped back into consciousness and cried out in a feverish panic.
“Kristoff! Please!”
“Keep your apologies,” Kristoff said, his voice demonic and strained.
Charles watched his adversary burying himself into the Nigerian. Nnamdi squirmed and pulled at Kristoff’s bicep that was still wrapped around his throat, but he was powerless under the madman’s grip. He clawed at the red earth beneath him, his fingernails cracking until his blood mixed into the dust.
Kristoff pulled a knife from his waistband and plunged it through Nnamdi’s hand, fastening it to the ground. “The next time you disrupt one of my fights, there will be shit on my knife instead of my dick!”
Nnamdi whimpered and winced with each thrust until Kristoff released a roar at the heavens as if daring the gods to intervene in his savagery. The huge man pulled himself out of the emasculated Nigerian, reached down, and ripped a large portion of Nnamdi’s shirt off his back. He used it to wipe the mixture of blood, feces, and semen off himself, and tossed it back at the Nigerian. He stood and worked his way back through the crowd.
“Donato!” Kristoff beckoned. “Is my bronzed beauty ready? I’ll be taking the bets today.”
Charles descended the ladder with haste, hoping to depart as quietly as he had arrived. He could neither save Elaina nor watch what might happen to her. Once he was on the ground again, he crawled away from the cheering crowds and fixed his eyes on the K-City horizon.
After what Charles calculated was an hour’s time, he saw the first signs of having reached his destination. A large, rectangular sign with sun-bleached, green borders and barely legible white letters read, Now Entering Katingal City. Beneath that was a vandal’s tag: All dat enter hear ubandun hope.
A brisk and eerie wind blew from inside the city and carried the scent of death and decay. The massive buildings cascading on either side of him cast a shadow forward, leading him further up the road. They were built so closely together that they appeared stacked atop one another along the flat landscape. He suspected that the warden’s boast of 6.7 million exiled criminals was more propaganda than fact. Besides those at the old farmhouse and the twenty-two inmates who arrived with him on the prison transport, the roadside skeletons were the only other evidence of inhabitants leading up to K-City.
“Circle around him!” barked a man in the alley around the corner. “Hurry!” There was some scurrying and crashing. “Get him, you fool!”
“It’s your fault he got out,” another man growled. “You better pray you catch
him, because if not, you’re the one that’ll be on the spit today.”
The two men continued to threaten each other amid the sound of trash and debris crashing. Charles ducked behind the nearest building and bumped a large, metal dumpster overflowing with a century’s worth of garbage. He struggled to keep his footing among plastic MRE packages, twisted and destroyed furniture, old scrap metal, and food so moldy and rotten that even the starving inmates wouldn’t eat it.
He crouched among the filth. Brown and black rats scattered into different directions. One ran up his leg. Charles snatched it and flung it against the brick wall. It fell, twitched, and lay still.
The men sounded like they were coming closer. A wild dog with patchy and matted fur staggered out from the alley. One of its hind legs trailed behind it like a second tail. It cast a quick, hopeful glance at Charles as though seeking help.
Sorry, Charles said silently to the mutt. You’re on your own. Just like the rest of us.
Seconds later, the men emerged in pursuit of the crippled dog. Their tattered clothing streamed like flags. The older of the two brandished a large piece of wood with nails protruding from it while the other carried a piece of metal fashioned into a sword. The younger paused a few times to hurl rocks at the dog.
“You’re letting a crippled dog outrun you,” the older man yelled.
The younger man threw another rock that came close to the dog’s head. He pursued while the elder man slowed, his breathing labored and heavy.
The elder stopped and bent over with his hands on his knees to cough and take in gulps of air. “You lose that dog, don’t bother coming back,” he wheezed.
Charles leaned to watch the scene but slipped on the debris. Another surge of rats evacuated the area. The old inmate looked up, his scarred face wrinkled with suspicion. He roared with dominance, gripped his weapon, and walked closer to peer around the dumpster.
When the inmate roared again, closer this time, Charles removed his ax from the twine around his waist and readied himself. Adrenaline surged through his body. His pulse pounded in his temples and the back of his skull.
The older man’s hunched shadow was twenty feet away when the dog yelped in the distance. Charles hefted his axe and readied to strike, but the older man turned in the opposite direction and ran toward the sound of the dog.
“Did you get him?” the elder man called eagerly.
“Oh yeah, I got him,” the younger man rejoiced. “Got him good, too. Not going to be running off now with two busted legs.”
Charles lowered his ax and placed it back into its rope holster. He watched the two men disappear behind the building, where the younger man had broken the dog’s other hind leg. Not wanting to take any additional risks, Charles doubled back and flanked around the other side of the building, abandoning the main road.
Chapter 13
A FEW HOURS AFTER EXPERIENCING the savagery at the abandoned farm and his encounter with the men and the dog, Charles arrived at the endless cluster of buildings that was K-City. The sun was hanging on the horizon as he penetrated the heart of the city center. The side streets and alleyways were the arteries that fed it, its criminal population its lifeblood.
As he looked around, Charles couldn’t shake the thought that only a poet could truly convey the complete havoc of this place. Buildings buckled from failing foundations. Their walls bulged and supports creaked as if they were in the perpetual process of snapping. Loose bricks fell at random. Insects and vermin scurried about the structures. Cesspools of human excrement so putrefied the air that Charles breathed through his mouth. Mixed with the stench of rotting flesh, it tasted like active disease.
As he walked, he admired the way inmates had clustered to protect the decayed spaces they had claimed as homes. Those who hadn’t found one roamed the streets aimlessly. Even on his way in, Charles saw several fights break out among these miserable humans who fought for just a patch of space on the street to call their own.
One of the buildings Charles passed on his way in featured what seemed to be the first successful garden he had seen since arriving on Katingal. It was guarded by an inmate who squatted at its entrance like a monkey in the bush. As Charles walked by, the inmate seemed to absorb his entire being in his stare, daring him to even consider stealing from his food supply. After a moment of locked eyes, the squatting inmate looked over his right shoulder at a large tree at the back of the garden. A body had been crucified to its trunk, and around the decaying corpse’s neck was a sign that read, Food Theef. Insects and maggots swarmed what remained of the criminal’s body to the point that his skin appeared to be moving.
Charles kept his eye on the inmate and was careful to display no hostile moves as he cleared the garden. The sun had set, casting the world into thick darkness, save for the occasional fire. The inmates who had been hiding during the day emerged like anxious vampires, all arriving at once to flood the streets with their suffering. Charles’s hyper-intelligence registered every visible inch of their skin, including rashes, blotchy blisters, scaly patches, and raised spots. These rampant inflammations triggered a memory of a text he had read about polymorphic light eruption, or PMLE. Caused by exposure to sunlight, this condition forced the sufferer to remain indoors, as extended exposure would result in fatality from auto-immune disease.
In the few minutes following nightfall, K-City’s epicenter morphed from scarcely populated to a flooded capacity. Charles was now shoulder to shoulder with lunatics, most of whom had clearly embraced the anarchy. He maneuvered in and out of the crowds of criminals, some hooting with insanity or enacting abuses on those weaker than themselves, and others looking like they had maintained some semblance of their humanity. Those were the ones Charles tried to avoid, since they could surely see that he was new among them.
Charles ducked in and out of alleys to remain inconspicuous. Those taking cover in the backstreets were afflicted in ways he had never seen. His mind began to spin again as he diagnosed every disease that had taken hold of the forgotten residents.
Countless corpses littered the streets. Some were fresh, others skeletal, and the rest accounted for every stage between. But the worst were those on the fringe of death. Their sores and lesions were as visible as the rodents and insects that feasted on the extremities of the helpless bodies. Charles realized that an inmate’s life expectancy in K-City diminished with every passing minute. Those dark and narrow corridors contained the most wretched conditions K-City had to offer.
One man on the ground near Charles was shaking with tremors. He alternated between low moans and high, vicious laughter as he lay dying. Charles paused before stepping over the tortured remains of the old man. As he did, the inmate tugged feebly at the leg of his coveralls. Charles snatched his leg away and turned to the man.
“Kill me, please,” he begged Charles, his eyes rolling as he spoke.
Charles gave a brief shake of his head and continued down the alley before coming to a dead end. He had no choice but to go back out the way he had come in, toward the dying man.
“You’re new,” the man said. “Your skin, too clear. Your face, too fat.”
Charles stepped over him again.
“One day you’ll lie here begging to die just like me.”
“Your suffering isn’t reason enough to strike you down,” Charles said.
The man burst into uncontrolled laughter, followed by a bitter cough. “You’re a liar and a stranger to this city,” he wheezed. “I’ve been here a long time. I know my way around. My wisdom in exchange for one blow of your ax?”
Charles considered it, then shrugged. It was worth a try. “Where does Kristoff reside?”
“Kristoff?” the stranger repeated, twitching at every bite the rats took from his flesh. “That’s easy. Is that all you want? If so, my death will come soon. As well as your own if it’s Kristoff you seek.”
“If a swift death is yo
ur desire, tell me where I find him,” Charles said.
“You will find Kristoff,” the man said before trailing off. “High-rise.” He tried to point with his finger, but his hand was unsteady.
Charles watched the rats feasting on the man’s bleeding legs. He kicked away two of the largest vermin.
“The top floor of the Apex building,” the man said. “Only one with a balcony still standing.”
With this information, Charles let his body grow stone cold, and his vision turned inward. His lust for revenge increased with every passing second until his trance was broken by the man’s insane laughter.
“That’s it,” the man cried. “Release the demon within you. Stain your ax and strike me down!”
Charles drew his ax from his waistband. The man continued to laugh. Charles raised his ax above his head and brought it down upon the side of the man’s neck. Blood spurted in all directions and ran down the man’s shoulder and the front of his chest. The rats scurried up his body and into the wound to feast on the fresh, warm blood. Charles reared back for another chop. The head rolled down the alley a few feet before coming to its final rest.
Charles sighed before cleaning off the blade on the man’s pants and leaving the alley. Back on the main drag of K-City, he scanned the skyline in search of the building the man had told him about. Soon he spied it in the distance, the largest building in K-City. The unmistakable Apex on top confirmed the target. Just beneath the sign, a balcony jutted out from the twentieth floor. Charles could see figures moving on the balcony.
Though Charles felt relieved to have discovered Kristoff’s lair, he could see that the savage was surrounded by his men. Nevertheless, Charles surged ahead, his heart racing in tempo with his legs as he moved closer to his objective.
As Charles drew near, a commotion broke out on the balcony. The group of men were drinking, dancing, and fighting as if the balcony were a mosh pit. One reveler grabbed another, while a third man struck the unfortunate chap with a pipe. He buckled, and with one swift movement, the two men flung their victim from the balcony. His limp body fell twenty floors to the hard pavement below. Charles heard the thump when it hit, and the cheers from a group of men who had been waiting for it on the street.