The Coliseum

by Patrick Lestewka

  “Oh, J-Juh-Jesus,” Edward trembles. “D-duh-don’t kill me!”

  “I won’t do that,” Harlan promises. “I’ll find a use for you.”

  “T-th-thuh-thank you,” Edward reaches into the tribute hamper and places a percussion grenade in Harlan’s hand. “I found it years ago; take it, take it…”

  Harlan leaves Edward to his blindness. He walks through his new army, staring at each man until they drop their eyes in supplication. He reaches the tier edge and stares down over the parapet. The Skineaters feast in silence below.

  Coming, Harlan stares down at the corpse-white men in purple robes. Coming for you.

  ««—»»

  Jackson’s mouth aches. He appraises his face in a fragment of reflective metal, wincing at the sight of his needlelike teeth.

  The Lord keep and comfort me, the Lord absolve me of sin…

  Even while suffering the indignity of body modification, tears of pain and humiliation rolling down his trembling cheeks, Jackson was thinking:

  How can I sway the flock? How can I command?

  “Gregor, dear brother. Come here for a moment.”

  The Skineater leader sets aside a knuckle of flesh-strung bone. “What is it, Messiah?”

  “Tell me about this place. Tell me why we are second class.”

  Gregor wipes a red sheen from his lips. “Is it any different from the outside world? There are weak and there are strong. We are feared by many, but those men—” pointing upwards, “—command the sky-meat. We cannot grow, cannot gain strength, because we must always cull our numbers. Until we overthrow those who keep their heels on our throats, we will remain second class.”

  When preaching at Eden Revisited, his disciples used to say the light of God shone through Jackson Cantrell’s eyes. Of course, it was a ruse: He applied reflective contact lenses before each sermon. Nevertheless, he stares at Gregor with fervent intensity as his voice rises to an impassioned baritone. “Why must this be, my good brother? Are we not men, equal in God’s eyes? Must we suffer as slaves under the yoke of deviants? Must the Lord’s will be perverted by such base heathens?”

  Some tribe members turn their backs, or mutter shut up under their breaths. But others turn to him, entranced, as so many have been, by his galvanic oratory. Jackson senses their interest like a shark smells blood in the water.

  “I look at you all and see hidden strength and simmering rage. I watch you watch the men who keep you down. They eat like kings while we—” he stabs a finger at the bloated corpse of Pierre Laframboise, “—must sate ourselves on our kin of kin! Why, brothers, why?”

  “Nothing wrong with what we eat,” Gregor says moodily. “Lots of…vitamins.”

  “Yeeesss,” Jackson replies, always the democrat. “Although new to your tribe, I too savor the taste of good brother Pierre.” Jackson plucks a shred of lung-meat from Pierre’s hollowed-out torso, popping it into his mouth and chewing with slow determination. “But such ambrosia should be sacred, not eaten simply to fuel our bodies. We should have—we deserve—our share of the sky-meat!”

  More men turn. They regard Jackson with a look he has come to recognize: Abject hopefulness, an aching need to believe. Jackson throws his arms wide as his voice climbs to pulpit-pitch. “Brothers, why do we remain in exile while the promised land is within our grasp? I have seen the men who keep us down—they are primitives! Why do we prostrate ourselves to such beasts?”

  “Yeah!” a voice from the back cries. “I want my share!”

  “We all want our share, brother! I say we take what is ours!”

  “But how?” Gregor says. “They are stronger than us. If we go to war, many will die.”

  “True,” Jackson says. “But when Jesus was hung on the cross, he suffered so mankind might thrive. So should it be with us—those who die shall be celebrated as heroes! A small sacrifice for divine justice!”

  “Justice!” A man stands with a crude metal club in his hands. “Justice for all!”

  “We all want justice, don’t we?”

  “Yes!” A chorus of voices respond.

  “The time for purging has arrived, brothers! Who shall join this crusade?”

  More men stand. They brandish metal bars and shivs and lengths of razor garrote-wire.

  “Yes my people,” Jackson nods. “Together we can reclaim what is ours. Reclaim what the Holy Father gives to all His creatures: Respect, dignity, equality.” He smiles, mouth a wall of serrated ivory. “Tonight we feast on brother Pierre—tomorrow we dine on savage hearts!”

  Another cheer, near-deafening.

  The smiling preacher senses confidence in the men’s faces, in their bodies, in their souls.

  These men will die. Die for the cause. Die…for me.

  The thought affords Jackson Cantrell great peace.

  His eyes wander to the upper tier. A man—the lumbering wretch he was recently incarcerated with, in fact—stares down, his massive arms steadied on the balcony rail.

  Coming, Jackson thinks. Coming for you.

  ««—»»

  Get hungry enough, you’ll do anything…

  Albert has shared Charlie’s bathroom for the past two days. They sit on the floor in cross-legged yogi position, slipping in and out of consciousness while the heating pipes moan and rattle above. Albert asks questions. Charlie answers them as best he can.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “Rats.”

  “How did you loose your toes?”

  “Rats.”

  “When people die, what happens to the bodies?”

  A sigh. “Rats.”

  A body learns to cope without food. The stomach shrinks and limbs atrophy, hair and fingernails fall out, gums recede and anemia sets in as, finally, one’s organs cease to function properly. Wounds turn septic and the body begins to rot from the inside-out like an old jack-o-lantern. The Coliseum buzzards must bear this daily destruction of their bodies, the incremental loss of strength, vision, hearing, and willpower.

  Their world narrows to a tiny pinprick of intent: Eat. Feed. Survive.

  Charlie has been imprisoned for five years. But Coliseum time bears no resemblance to real time. He is fifty but looks much older. His body has been ravaged by the sleepless nights and constant fear, the mind-numbing violence and repetitive self-mutilation. He is not the same man who worked the high steel, the same animal who murdered willowy faggots in seedy motel rooms. That man—his vigor, his rage, his savagery—is dead. All that remains is a dead soul in a sagging casement struggling through another day.

  Get hungry enough, you’ll do anything…

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Must be nice.” Charlie’s starvation-wracked body hasn’t produced anything more substantial than a walnut-sized turd in years.

  “Where do I go?”

  “Anywhere you want.”

  “What about the stalls?”

  “Be my guest.”

  The stall dividers are crimped sheet metal dotted with clods of caked excrement. The toilet is the color of melted butter, a thin fissure running down the bowl’s curve from which brackish water seeps. Shit-fattened bluebottles hover in search of warm mounds to deposit their eggs-sacs in. Albert steps closer.

  “Dear Christ,” he gags.

  The bowl brims with putrefied human waste, surface the mottled brown of a rotten banana. The excrement-skin is hard enough for insects—sinuous, segmented millipedes—to scurry over its surface, digging burrows through the flaking feces.

  Charlie waits until Albert is inside the stall before creeping to his feet. He has learned to live by the law of the jungle: Kill, eat, or die. He does not care for Albert one way or another: In the Coliseum, compassion is a luxury nobody can afford. The old man imagines Albert’s body stashed in a safe place…imagines shaving pieces off the corpse and pawning flesh as tribute… fatting himself on fragments of pitiful Albert Rose. He’d be doing him a favor, really: A quick, relatively painless death as opposed to the dismal e
xistence of a buzzard.

  Hungry enough, do anything…

  “I can’t go in here, Char—”

  A concussive blow to the skull sends Albert face-first into the toilet. His head breaks through crusted shit, submerging neck-deep in warm brown soup. Millipedes scurrying through his hair, peppering his scalp with poisonous stings. His hands are braced on the floor. Grime squirts between fingers.

  “Be still, be still,” Charlie pushes Albert’s head deeper into the bowl. “Breathe, breathe.”

  Acid-ferment bites at Albert’s eyes. His lungs burn for air. Charlie reaches between his legs and gives his balls a wrenching twist. Albert screams and his mouth fills with stagnant shit-water. Clumps and flakes of feces smear his lips and teeth and tongue. His sphincter unclenches and a tropical rainstorm of shit issues from his asshole to slick the seat of his overalls. He pushes backwards frantically, trying to pull his head clear.

  “Goddamn it,” Charlie hisses. “Stay down! Die!”

  Albert fires a mule-kick up into Charlie’s balls. The old man wheezes but keeps the pressure on. Another shot to the nuts and he staggers away. Albert pulls his head out of the toilet and looses an explosive stream of vomit. Shit is clumped in his hair and streaks his face like war-paint. “You,” Albert gasps. “You fucker!”

  “You don’t know what it’s like in here, son. Every man for his goddamn self.”

  “Tried to kill me!”

  “Easy, son, easy.”

  Charlie’s weapon is a crude one: A sharpened nail pounded into a wooden doorstop. He keeps it hidden in a back pocket, close at hand. “You’d a done the same, son,” he says. “Hell, I was doing you a favor.”

  “Sick bastard!”

  Albert grabs at Charlie, fingers digging deep grooves into his shoulders. “You prick you prick you prick,” he’s saying.

  The old man stabs upward with the shiv, aiming for Albert’s neck. Albert ducks right and wraps his hands around the weapon. They fall to the floor. A gagging sound, then a sound like an awl punching through soft leather. This is followed by a windless wheezing noise.

  Albert rises. The doorstop protrudes from Charlie’s lower jaw like a wooden goatee, eight inches of ten-penny nail thrust into his head. Albert can see the column of cold metal glinting though the old man’s unhinged mouth.

  Charlie’s scrawny body slamdances on the floor, arms flailing, legs thrashing about. Blood hemorrhages from various orifices to spread across the tiles. Charlie’s clawing at his throat, trying to let some air in, but his lungs are full of blood and he only succeeds in tearing ribbons of skin off his neck and throat with the bony stumps of his fingers, leaving greenish snail-trails on his skin.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Albert whispers. “Oh, Jesus Christ…”

  He stumbles out of the bathroom.

  To his left: Stairs leading down.

  Into the basement.

  — | — | —

  V. CANNIBAL CATS WON’T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT

  Perhaps it is night, perhaps morning. Beneath the cold, black dome it is impossible to tell. Months, weeks, days, hours, minutes blend together, an interminable expanse of time.

  The time is now.

  “Come, brothers.” Jackson moves through his tribe, patting backs, kneading shoulders, whispering words of encouragement. “Let us take back what is ours.”

  Up the stairs they go. Their boneflint hands clasp steel bars and metal spurs and gauze-wrapped slivers of glass. Their route takes them past starvation-addled buzzards huddled in corners and lying atop heating grates, all of them marinating in their own stench and depression. Jackson leads, a saw-toothed pied piper bolstering his lemmings’ mettle.

  “Like David unto Goliath, brothers, so shall we slay the cruel tyrant with a sling of righteousness!”

  Harlan hears them coming. He cocks his head, dog-like, trying to guess their numbers. Soon the Baboon Boys rise. Harlan grunts and the men scurry to their hovels, awkward in their nakedness, flaccid penises whipping to and fro. They arm themselves with crude weapons and furious invective:

  “—fuckin’ flesh-eating freaks think they can come up here—”

  “—gonna smash their bald heads to powder—”

  “—dead, dead, dead, motherfuckin’ dead—”

  The Skineaters charge hard, shouting absurd mantras:

  “—reclaim the promised land—”

  “—and justice for all—”

  “—Do it for Pierre! For Pierre! For Pieeeeerre!—”

  They meet outside the Baboon Boys’ perimeter, Jackson and Harlan heading their respective tribes. Like Civil War soldiers, they line up against one another between the rows of seats, each man set on a gently curved collision course with his opposite number.

  “Where is Edward?” Gregor says, pounding a dented pipe into the meat of his palm.

  “Over there.” Harlan points at a humped figure sitting high in the stands. The blind ex-leader looks up, displaying his glistening eyeless sockets and whimpering like a crippled tomcat.

  “You see?” Jackson thunders, “what these heathens do? Will we bow to such animals?”

  “At least we don’t eat each other!” one of the Baboon Boys shouts, flexing a loop of barbed wire between his fists.

  “See how they mock us! See how they throw our necessary crimes back in our faces! Tell us, infidels, why we must eat our own kind?”

  “Because you’re sick fucks!” the Baboon Boy says.

  “Miscreant!” Jackson slams his foot on the cement, kicking up a cloud of powdered cockroach husks. “You refuse to share the food amongst your brothers! What are we to do— starve?”

  “That was the general idea,” the Baboon Boy shrugs. “You all should’ve been dead years ago.” He points at the fulminating preacher. “Who the fuck is this guy? You little pantywaist, Gregor, you lose control?”

  “Son-of-a-bitch!” Gregor brandishes a thick copper pipe.

  “Bring it on, pussy. I’m not your baby brother; you won’t drop me that easy.”

  The groups draw closer. Harlan raises his hand.

  “Men, I’m sure we can settle this decently.”

  “I see Satan in this man,” Jackson says. “I see the fires of hell burning in his eyes! The devil is sly; he has many guises and many deceits!”

  The humid air crackles with pent-up electricity.

  Just one combustible element…

  The roof-hatch opens and a tiny circlet of gray sky appears. The sound of grinding gears as the sky-meat begins its dripping descent.

  …and boom—everything blows sky-high.

  “That is ours! Take it, my brothers! Kill anyone who dares stop us!”

  “That’s how you want it,” Harlan unslings the railing bar from his shoulder. “That’s how you’ll get it.”

  ««—»»

  “Boss,” the young guard says. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

  The Master Guard leans over the kid’s shoulder and peers at the grainy black-and-white image.

  “Looks like a brawl.” The kid fingers a toggle, focusing the camera lens on the unfolding scene. “The two big groups. Almost every member, I’d say.”

  The look on the Master Guard’s face doesn’t suggest compassion, or pity, or frustration: He looks vindicated. “Told you they were gearing up for war in there. Those new fish were the missing ingredients.”

  He stares at the screen: A roiling mass of bodies slashing and stabbing and biting. He says, “Going to be a bonanza for the rats come dawn. Get a rough head count after this settles and decrease the food supply accordingly.”

  “What do you think they’re fighting over, sir?”

  “Men like that?” the Master Guard shakes his head. “Kid, they kill just to remind themselves they’re still breathing.”

  ««—»»

  Gregor is thrusting a skewer of splintered wood into the soft abdominal meat of a Baboon Boy whose face has been chewed half-off when he feels a whickering wind pass between his legs. He stares down at h
is split nutsack, gonads dangling like a pair of stemmed bing cherries and blood spurting over his milky thighs. He turns to see Byron Covey, a 26-year-old serial pederast, grinning up at him. Byron’s hands clutch a wickedly curved billhook and he slashes again, a quick and deliberate stroke. Gregor’s testicles plop to the floor and tumble down the slight grade, underneath the seats, picking up a sheen of dust as they roll. They come to rest against the parapet’s crook looking like a pair of powdered figs. Gregor’s testicular stems tremble between his legs like antennae. The man who was once Jeremy Hanson falls to his knees. A last sense-memory—warm flesh on his tongue—zigzags across his mind a split-second before Byron buries the billhook in his neck…

  Edward Tonnere cowers beneath the seats while the battle rages. He does not hear Jackson Cantrell sneak up beside him, or see the sharpened piston-rod in the preacher’s hand. But Edward feels it when the piston-rod is jammed into the waxy canal of his ear, feels his eardrum detonate with an internal sigh, feels Jackson’s hands steadying his head as blood explodes from the erupted chasm and trickles down the arc of his throat. Finally, he feels dim pressure as Jackson kicks the piston-rod with a booted foot, pounding it into Edward’s eyeless skull like a tent peg into dense clay…

  Harlan wades through the stands, loosing the railing bar with a Hank Aaron homerun swing, smashing bones and shattering cartilage, pulping flesh and snuffing lives. Emboldened by Jackson’s dogma, a wild-eyed Skineater rushes the man-mountain. Harlan chops down with all his Herculean strength and the Skineater’s jawbone sails end-over-end through the air and lands, a chalk-white crescent moon spider-skittering across the floor. Tattered flesh hanging from his cheeks, the Skineater drops, shocked, searching for his missing jaw like a man who’s lost a contact lens. Harlan rams the blood-spattered bar through his skull…