The Coliseum

by Patrick Lestewka

  Edward turns to his group and whispers gutturally. It’s as if the Coliseum is choosing sides for a pick-up softball game. The iris of an infrared camera pans to capture the scene.

  “You can have the girly-boy,” Edward says. “We’re taking the other one.”

  “No, no, no,” Gregor stamps his foot like a testy child. “We saw him first…he’s ours!”

  “Don’t make me come over there. Don’t make me pry every broken tooth out of your skull and stomp your face flat on the stones.” Edward slaps his iron bar into his palm. “Don’t make me do that.”

  “We want him, too,” Gregor points at Pierre. The Frenchman smiles like someone who’s been invited to join an exclusive fraternity. “You take the other one.”

  “We don’t want him.”

  “Then leave him for the buzzards.”

  “But, Jeremy, you’re the buzzard.”

  Gregor bares his sharpened teeth. “Just wait. Your time is coming.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Edward says. “But until you control the sky-meat you’re no threat to me.” He points at Harlan. “You just won the lottery, you lucky prick.”

  Edward’s group is fifteen-strong. Not one of them could take Harlan one-on-one (or two-on-one, or three-on-one for that matter), but many fire-ants are capable of killing a scorpion. He could run and hide…but why? He’s been accepted into the dominant group. Their leader is overconfident—confidence breeds arrogance, arrogance breeds recklessness…and recklessness is the prelude to a fall.

  “Gather ’round.” Edward’s teeth are black stumps, gums seeping blood. His breath smells like the alleyway behind an abattoir. He cups Harlan’s groin and says, “Let’s be sociable.”

  The Baboon Boys form a gap-toothed circle around their newest member, gibbering like monkeys and clutching at his overalls. One man leaps onto Harlan’s back, knotting his fists in Harlan’s hair. The Beast hauls the man over his shoulder and snaps the writhing body across his knee like so much driftwood. Others wrap themselves around his legs and chest, screaming and spitting and dragging him to the floor. Harlan’s skull ricochets off the cement and darkness floods in…

  “You are zo white,” Pierre says, sauntering toward the ghostly stickmen. “Like ze ghost, no?”

  Gregor crooks a skeletal finger at Jackson and says, “Keep.” Then he points at Pierre and whispers, “Meat.”

  The Skineater tribe fractures. Half of them advance on Jackson, who is cowering beside the shit-streaked penalty box. The white wraiths lay their hands on him.

  “Do not worry,” they say. “You are the chosen.”

  “Yes, brothers,” Jackson smiles weakly. “I see the light of temperance in your eyes.”

  Gregor runs his hands over Jackson’s face and neck, his sweaty hair. “Take him home.”

  “Praise you, brother,” Jackson’s eyes shimmer with unspilled tears. “Praise you.”

  The other group strings out to form a circle around the Frenchman. Their mouths are open and their jagged teeth glitter like spear-tips.

  “Ey dere, guys…” Pierre’s smile performs an abrupt vanishing act.

  The men of the Skineater tribe press closer. Blue spiderweb veins track the milky flesh of their necks and arms, resembling dark brushstrokes on an oriental plate. Deep scars trace the curve of their hairless skulls like organic racing stripes.

  “Come on, dere…we friends, right?”

  They descend on Pierre. Some grab his arms while others knit themselves between his legs like ghostly parasites.

  “Jesus Christ, stop dis—AAAHHH!”

  Sharpened teeth sink into Pierre’s flesh, tearing free chunks of living tissue. Pierre screams as a mouth clamps over the upper helix of his ear and rips it off with the sound of worn upholstery tearing. Spidery hands all over him, slashing at his overalls in search of the soft meat underneath. Someone bites the top of his head, then another wet ripping sound as a patch of Pierre’s hair and scalp is torn off and stuffed into a hungry maw.

  A pair of greedy lips clamps over his own and a foreign tongue probes the warm recesses of his mouth. Pierre can only gasp as his tongue is torn out and spat on the dusty floor. Then his lips are chewed off to leave his naked pink gums and peg-square teeth devoid of shelter. His incisors snap open and closed and, lacking the soft muffling flesh, they sound like novelty chattery teeth. His boots are pried from his feet and mouths batten around his frantically wriggling toes. And someone is tearing at his belly, now, tearing with long sharp nails and there is a horrid liquid hissing sound as Pierre’s stomach opens up like someone jerking the seam on a Ziploc bag full of medical waste and its contents—a half-digested bran muffin, the now-masticated contents of a foil packet of airline peanuts, a can of Diet Coke—splash across the ground with a stench that defies all description.

  So hip to be square, yeah, hip to be square…

  Blood streaking Pierre’s body and blood staining his yellow uniform and blood every-fuckin-where else besides. Pierre barely feels his nose ripped from its moorings or the blood gushing in to flood his sinus cavity. A mouth fastens over his eye socket and sucks out his sight, the pulpy orb mashed between phantom jaws, an insistent tongue exploring the raped socket. Finally, horrifically, a shard of glass is used to cut around Pierre’s head, under the jawbone and across the forehead, and his face lifted off, all in one piece, like a Halloween mask. The Skineaters fight over this grisly prize like dingoes.

  Pierre Laframboise, the Bloody Butcher of Quebec, is dragged into the stands.

  Albert Rose sits alone on the concrete floor.

  As always, he is unwanted.

  ««—»»

  “You sad-sack fuck.” The Master Guard watches Pierre’s mutilated body disappear up a darkened stairwell. “You had no idea.”

  The black-and-white image flickers, fades to snow, reappears. Most cameras in the Coliseum have been destroyed by the inmates; the control-room console is scattered with dead screens. Only the Eyes In The Sky remain, which allow the guards to monitor roughly one-quarter of the total prison area. The ongoing activity in many sectors—the basement, the equipment wing, the hallways girding the arena floor—are unknown to the guards.

  The Master Guard yawns. “I’ve got to go home and check in with the little lady,” he tells the nightwatch security man. Centered on a tiny 8-by-8 screen, Albert Rose sits crosslegged, head in hands. “Keep an eye on that poor bastard.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nothing we can do, but…”

  “Goodnight, sir.”

  “Yeah. Goodnight.”

  — | — | —

  III. INITIATION

  Springtime. Ten-year-old Harlan Ruddock roams the schoolyard, dead-heading dandelions. The bell rings to end recess but Harlan ignores it. He imagines himself as an airborne Ranger shot down behind enemy lines and forced to fight his way back to allied territory: He tosses clumps of soil overhand, dirt-grenades, making the sound of an explosion when they land. He hears the school doors open and ducks behind a trash can as his teacher scans the schoolyard.

  “Harlan?” she says. “Harlan, time to come inside!”

  She is a kind woman and a fine teacher but school holds no interest for him. She gives the field a final pass. The door closes. Harlan is free.

  He walks along the school wall, ducking to pass under the open classroom windows. There is much to be done with this newfound freedom: He could venture to the city dump and pick through the leavings of society, go fishing in the nature preserve, or head home, crawl through the basement window, and watch Looney Tunes with the volume turned low—

  “Hey, boyo.” The voice comes from behind. “Supposed to be in school.”

  It’s Ferdie Gibson, the groundskeeper. Ferdie’s an older man with white hair sprouting above a pair of lumpen ears; the same wiry hair sprouts from his ears, and his nostrils, fluttering like New Year’s party favors when he exhales. He is dressed in grass-stained overalls unbuttoned to mid-chest to reveal pale skin, a nest of
sweaty chest hair, and a dangling St. Christopher’s medallion. His hands are large, knotted and look like they enjoy pinching things.

  “Feeling sick, sir,” Harlan says. “I’m going home.”

  Ferdie slants his eyes and digs between his yellow teeth with a yellow fingernail. “Got a permission note, boyo?”

  “My mom called. I…I don’t have a note.”

  “One piss-poor excuse, you shifty li’l booger.” Ferdie grabs Harlan by the wrist. “To the principal’s office with ya.”

  Even at ten years old Harlan severely outweighs the spindly groundskeeper; he could rip free and run away. But he still possesses that instinctive fear of adults, that inclination to roll over and bare his throat. “Please, mister. Don’t take me back—”

  “Too late for that. Take yer med’cine like a man.”

  “No, no, wait. I’ll do anything—”

  Ferdie stares at Harlan with an expression he’ll become familiar with later in life: Mingled hunger, avarice, and desire. It is the look in a raven’s eyes after it overturns a turtle to peck at its unprotected belly.

  “Well,” he says. “Could use some help tendin’ ma chores…”

  “Sure,” Harlan says. “Anything you want.”

  “’Course, if’n I do this favor, it must be kep’ a secret…”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “Come wit’ me, then.”

  Ferdie’s tool-shed is located at the far end of the football field bordering the woods. It smells of wet grass and cedar shavings and cacao hulls. By the light of a sixty-watt bulb, Harlan notes various landscaping implements: A grass-flecked riding lawnmower, a pitchfork with two snapped tines that reminds him of a hockey player’s smile, rusted lawnmower blades hung on pegs like propellers, and rolls of sod covered by a transparent tarp.

  “Sit on doon, boyo.” A kerosene stove is clamped to the edge of a workbench. “Fancy a cuppa tea?”

  “Uh…sure.”

  Harlan sits on frayed lawn chair. Ferdie sets a kettle to boil and places teabags into styrofoam cups.

  “’Bout this time of day, the body craves a cuppa tea.” He puts his hands in his pockets; they move under there like rats under a dirty blanket. “The body has many cravin’s, my boy.”

  Frayed chair fibers poke through Harlan’s tee-shirt, rubbing uncomfortably against his back. “So, what do you want me to do? I could pick weeds, or—”

  “I’ll find a use fer ye. Keep yer trousers on.”

  The kettle shrieks. Ferdie rummages through a bench drawer and extracts a bottle of white pills: Lidocaine; a double dosage will paralyze the central nervous system for hours. He crumbles two capsules into the steaming tea.

  “Drink oop, while it’s hot.”

  The tea’s bitter odor reminds Harlan of hospitals. He sips. It tastes foul.

  “Is this,” his Adam’s Apple bobs, “how tea tastes?”

  “Good Scottish tea,” Ferdie frowns. “Drink it, boyo, ’less yer lookin’ ta go back ta school.”

  Harlan drinks some more. Powder grits between his teeth.

  “Good stuff, in’t it?”

  “Kind of…strange.” Harlan’s fingertips are like breadsticks. Coldness tracks up his thighs and cuts a numbing trail down his arms. “I…can’t…feel…my…fa…” His facial muscles slacken and his mouth unhinges like a sprung door. Although unable to move, he remains completely aware.

  “Look at ye, boyo. What a big, strapping lad.”

  For a moment Ferdie just stares at the boy as if he were a wondrous work of art. Then he kneels at Harlan’s feet and wrenches his legs open. A rawboned hand traces the curve of his thighs, moving upwards to cup an undeveloped cock and walnut-sized balls.

  “Oooh, what’s that now,” the groundskeeper’s breath stinks of rotting meat marinating in dog shit. “What a monster. Soon ye’ll be makin’ the girlies squirm.”

  He peels off Harlan’s tee-shirt. Harlan’s body is dark and hairless. Ferdie peppers the boy’s chest with drooling baby-kisses, tongue circling Harlan’s nipples and darting into his bellybutton. He is making strange cooing noises and nipping the skin of the boy’s armpit.

  “Such a beautiful lad. A loovely, loooovely child.”

  He lifts young Harlan as if he were a sack of peat moss, draping him over the workbench. Harlan inhales the mingled smells of two-stroke engine oil and paint-thinner, Weed-Ex and ammonia. He focuses on a prefab pegboard hung with gardening shears and chisels, hacksaws and screwdrivers. He stares into one of the tiny black holes in the pegboard, willing himself to disappear into that small black space, somewhere far away, where none of this is happening.

  He cannot feel his underpants being removed or the greedy hands fondling his testicles; cannot feel his limp cock milked like a bovine teat or the grease-slicked fingers probing the puckered knothole of his anus.

  “Oh, me boyo,” the groundskeeper moans. “Such a bonny wee arse.”

  The old man’s turgid cock feels like a wooden dowel stroking Harlan’s ass. A sensation of mild pressure as, with a grunt and a sigh, Ferdie slips himself inside. Then a slow and steady rocking motion. Halan’s face is rubbed raw on the workbench’s unvarnished wood. The groundskeeper kisses his spine, each knobby vertebrae, kisses the nape of his neck, thrusting and thrusting as bloated bluebottle flies alight on their sweat-slick bodies.

  “Oooh, what a wunnerful, wunnerful fuck ye are, boyo!”

  A furious discharge and then something is flowing between the cleft of Harlan’s ass.

  The sound of a zipper hastily zipped.

  “Now, me leetle soldier,” Ferdie’s mouth next to his ear, “you were good this afternoon. Keep on bein’ good, keep yer gob zipped, and I maybe won’t slit yer leetle throat.”

  Harlan woke up in a deserted lot with blood caked on his face and an egg-sized lump on his skull. The seat of his pants was dark with blood and clotted shit. When he tried to walk his anus burned like it had been reamed with a searing poker.

  He did as Ferdie said. He kept his mouth shut.

  But he never forgot. Never forgave.

  And, ten years later, he came back…

  “Hello, Ferdie.”

  Ferdie stared at the 300-pound behemoth filling the doorway of his tool-shed. Fear etched every feature of his haggard face and saliva glands squirted bitter juices into his mouth. “Who are ye? What ye want with a poor old sod like me?”

  “How soon we forget.” Harlan’s right hand gripped the hilt of a fillet knife. “We had some times, Ferdie, you and I. Some high times.”

  “Don’t know wha’tcher talkin’ aboot,” Ferdie’s hands scuttled along the bench-top in search of a weapon. “Now git, ya beeg bastard, ’fore I call the cops.”

  “Come on now.” Harlan’s body was a solid black wall advancing. “I’m your leetle soldier, aren’t I?”

  “Get away, I’m warnin’ ye—”

  Harlan grabbed the groundskeeper’s throat and shook his scarecrow-body as if it were a ragdoll. He spun the groundskeeper around and pinned his neck to the workbench like a chicken on a chopping block.

  “You popped my cherry, boyo. Let me return the favor.”

  Ferdie screamed as the fillet knife was buried to the hilt in his asshole. Blood and soupy excrement exploded from the wound, filling the shed with its slaughterhouse stench. Harlan twisted the blade, slicing inwards and upwards through coiled intestine. Soon the hole was so wide and so distended it seemed for all the world that Ferdie’s anus had exploded with crushed raspberries.

  The old groundskeeper screamed and his hands clenched whitely around the workbench. Scarlet pancake batter shot from his shit-hoop with the rude farting noise a near-empty mustard bottle makes when squeezed—schpluuuutt! A loop of viscera distended from the shredded mess. Harlan grabbed it and jerked with all his considerable strength. Ferdie made a babbling noise as ten-odd feet of gut spooled out of his asshole in a greasy spaghetti-string. Harlan grasped it halfway up and squeezed and something shot out the end to spatter his boots.
White threads wriggled contentedly in the pool of shit and undigested food: Easily the healthiest tapeworms Harlan had ever seen.

  The old man was still babbling and it was getting on Harlan’s nerves so, with care and precision, he cut the man’s cheeks from lips to ears and, hooking his fingers between the lips and underneath the tongue, grasping the lower palate, tore the bottom half of Ferdie’s mouth off. The jawbone snapped with the sound of a firecracker detonated inside a tin can and the rest came away quite easily. The tiny pink tombstone of Ferdie’s tongue flopped and flapped comically. Harlan stuffed the bloody horseshoe of bone and teeth between the cleft of the groundskeeper’s buttocks, burying it elbow-deep.

  “You’re a lucky man, Ferdie,” he said with satisfaction. “Few people get the chance to eat their own ass.”

  With no more effort than a man hefting a seamstress’s dummy, Harlan hooked the groundskeeper onto a beam-peg. The position allowed Ferdie the opportunity to witness his body drain in greasy clots, intestines continuing to unfurl from his ass like the Hindu rope-trick. Vengeance not yet sated, Harlan sliced the man’s prick off and shoved it into the wet red wound of his mouth. The circumcised purple head poked droopily through Ferdie’s esophageal-hole. Harlan thought it looked like a wild mushroom growing out of his throat.

  “Tit-for-tat, old man,” he said. “You’ve got to…

  …wake up. Wake up, you big bastard.”

  Harlan swims up into consciousness, head throbbing like an abscessed tooth. He’s laid across several stadium seats. Contoured plastic presses against his calves, buttocks, back. He is naked and surrounded: Figures loom above him, grunting and murmuring.

  “—check the size of the guy—”

  “—I’ve seen him before, at Gellsburg, had a nickname—”

  “—the Beast, the Beast, it’s the fucking Beast—”

  The hairs on Harlan’s forearms tingle. He glances up to see he’s within five feet of the arena’s electrified dome. Blood rills down the bridge of his nose and there’s a bump on his forehead the size of an infant’s fist.