by Perrin Briar
Maisie peered around at her surroundings, disorientated, and began to doggy-paddle her way toward Chris, who stood on the edge of the canal and helped her out. The water ran down her face and drenched clothes onto the dry soil on the ground, turning it into boot-sucking mud.
“Why did you do that for?” Maisie said with a scowl.
“I had to wake you up.”
“I was tired!”
“You can’t fall asleep within the next,” he checked his watch, “six hours. If you do, you might turn prematurely.”
“But I’m so tired!”
“It’s the virus making you tired, but you can’t give in. You have to stay awake, no matter what.”
A car horn honked from the other side of the earth bank. Chris and Maisie scaled the mound. When they got to the top they found George hanging out of the driver’s side window pointing up the road, in the direction they’d come from.
A gang of motorcycles were eating up the road heading straight for them.
Z-MINUS: 5 HOURS 35 MINUTES
Chris took Maisie’s hand and dragged her down the mound to the car. They jumped in through the door they’d left open.
“Go, go, go!” Chris said, reaching for the door and slamming it shut.
The back wheels skidded, tossing up mud, and then pulled onto the road. George worked his way up the gears, the engine revving in response. Soon they were at full speed. Chris looked back and saw the motorcycles were not falling behind, but getting closer.
“It’s no good,” Chris said. “They’re travelling faster than us. We’ll never get away.”
“Maybe they’ll turn back,” George said.
The old car began to shiver and shake, and then groaned painfully like a ship that was threatening to capsize.
“The car’s not going to take it,” Chris said. “We have to stop.”
George leaned forward in his seat, peering at something that glittered across the road. George frowned, put his hand on the gearstick to shift down, but hesitated. He raised his foot off the accelerator, but did not hit the brakes. Probably nothing.
There was a loud bang, and the car veered sharply to one side, the back pulling out. The car spun around in circles. Chris wrapped his arm around Maisie and braced himself on the front seat with the others. The car ground to a halt with a jolt, facing the wrong way. The motorcyclists were growing larger now, almost on them. George put the car into first gear and hit the accelerator, but there was a loud grating noise, and the car moved sideways and then stopped.
“Got a baked bean tin can trick for this?” Chris said.
George said nothing.
“What was that?” Chris said. “A blowout?”
“We ran over something,” George said.
“Glass, maybe? There’s a lot of that on the roads.”
“No, it wasn’t glass. It was long and black and sharp. Like nails.”
“Nails?”
Chris looked out through the rear window and saw a long trail of spikes stretched across the road in a series of uniformed lines. Then they moved, slithering aside like a snake with iron scales, behind a parked car.
Chris arched his neck to look for what could be behind the car to have made the nail trap move. He saw a dark shape, like a shadow, through the windows on the opposite side. There was another shape standing by a car that was dented on the front end.
“Let’s try and be friendly,” Chris said.
“They don’t look all that friendly to me,” George said.
The motorcyclists pulled up on the other side of the cars. They kicked their stands out. To a man they wore heavy black boots and leather jackets. Most of them sported long hair, some falling to their shoulders, others defying gravity and standing up from their heads in bright colours arranged into spikes or twisted flames. A huge man with a green Mohawk stepped forward. He looked the broken car over, and then his eyes found Chris in the backseat.
“Get out of the car,” Mohawk said.
“What do you think?” George said in a low voice. “Should we make a run for it?”
“In a car with flat wheels?” Chris said. “How far would we get?”
Mohawk stepped closer, but still stood a good ten feet away. He appeared to have some kind of skin disease, his face covered with blue-black shapes. But as he moved closer Chris realised it wasn’t a disease. He was covered in black and blue tattoos with weird symbols of eyes and dragon scales.
“Get out of the car,” Mohawk repeated.
“Do you think we might be able to take them?” George said. “Are you feeling up to it?”
“Up to what?”
“Fighting.”
“They’ve got weapons.”
George nodded to Chris’s hands.
“So do you,” he said.
“I… I can’t fight.”
“Your daughter’s life depends on it. You have to fight.”
“I can’t.”
George blinked and stared at Chris as if seeing him for the first time. His brows drew down into a disgusted frown.
“Then we’d best do as he says, hadn’t we?” George said.
“We can’t get distracted for too long. Maisie…”
“We’ll get out of this.Whatever this is.”
Chris and George put their hands up, dropping them only to open their doors.
“We’re unarmed!” George said as he stepped from the car. “We’re unarmed!”
The men behind Mohawk stepped forward and seized Chris and George, pressing them hard against the car bonnet. It felt hot against Chris’s cheek.
“Take it easy!” Chris said, but the men paid no mind to his protests.
A man with blue spikes opened the fuel cap, inserted a pipe, sucked on the end, and fed it into a fuel container as the fuel began to wind its way through.
“My daughter’s in the back,” Chris said. “Be careful with her.”
Mohawk opened the back door. Maisie kicked and screamed. Mohawk grabbed at her flailing limbs.
“I said be careful!” Chris said.
Mohawk seized her arm. She brought her teeth down and bit him. He pulled his hand back and looked at the bite mark. He sneered, looked at Maisie, and then slapped her hard across the face with his open palm.
“Keep your hands off her!” Chris said, twisting his body and using the car to leverage himself against his assailants. But they laid down on top of him, pinning him in place.
Mohawk handed Maisie over to a subordinate and then stepped up to Chris. He crouched down so Chris could see his face. He wore a grin.
“You’re going nowhere,” he said.
Mohawk held out his hand and someone placed something heavy and black into it.
“No!” Chris shouted. “You have to let us go! No!”
Chris felt the weight on top of him shift aside a fraction. Chris heard something heavy sfft through the air and the world went black.
Z-MINUS: 5 HOURS 26 MINUTES
Chris’s eyes shot open. He burst upright, gasping gulps of air into his hungry lungs. He had a heavy sweat on his forehead and body, his clothes clinging to him. He looked this way and that, not taking in any real details. He felt himself begin to fall back under his own weight. He caught himself with his hand, which found soft sand-like dirt on the ground. He closed his eyes against the spinning world.
Two figures stood over him, speaking to him, but he didn’t understand what they were saying. Scared, he scrabbled back on his hands and feet, his head bumping into a wall, causing a loud rattling sound that only confused him further. Something big growled at him, and when Chris turned, he found a large dog leaping up at him, spittle flying from its mouth. It bounced off a thick wire cage-like wall, its nails hooked through the small square holes. It jammed the tip of its snout into one hole.
Someone grabbed Chris by the lapels, pulled him away from the fence and lifted him to his feet. Chris stepped back and was faced with two figures. As he blinked they came into focus. It was George and Maisie. He stared at
them a long moment, and then reached forward and hugged Maisie tight.
Chris kept his eyes closed for a few minutes, and in the absence of vision, his ears picked up clues about where they were: the low murmur of a thousand voices above them, along with their heavy footsteps on wooden planks above, the soft chink of dog lead chains behind them, and the soft murmur of two people nearby, muttering under their breath. And another voice, this one high-pitched, as if begging, but Chris could only catch one word in ten: “please,” “not me,” and “I shouldn’t be here.” Then Chris opened his eyes.
They were in a small rectangular room. The walls consisted of a thick wire mesh of squares. Large men in black leather uniforms stood on the other side, chatting, not paying them much attention. Their dogs strained at their studded collars, eyes fixed firmly on them, the prisoners. Their hackles rose like the fur of a hyena, lips drawn back revealing small but sharp teeth. Chris turned his attention to the others in the cage.
There was a young man in a rusty wheelchair. His head was tilted to one side, white drool seeping out of the corner of his mouth, his legs and arms were skinny. But his eyes were active and alive, darting this way and that. There were two old couples. One was bent over an old copy of the Bible, mumbling and bowing their heads together, holding one another’s hands. The other old couple looked sad and forlorn, standing in the corner in worn expensive clothes. There was a fat man with one arm sat in the dirt picking it up in a fist and letting it dribble between his fingers. Another woman stood looking out through the cage door at the opposite end, her back to them. She had a distant faraway expression in her eyes. Her hair was a tangled mess and her eyes were big and wide like saucers.
Everyone had a number painted on the front of their clothes with vibrant red paint. There was a tight thick feeling of expectation that made Chris almost choke.
“Where are we?” Chris said to George.
“In some kind of prison.”
“Thanks for that. But why are we here?”
“You are a sacrifice,” a voice said from the corner.
A woman in her early thirties with shoulder length hair pulled back severely from her beautiful brown face stepped from the shadows. She was tall, almost as tall as George, but thin and lithe. Hers was a body of ropey strength. Her eyes were piercing, glaring at them one by one.
“Who are you?” Chris said.
“I’m Zora. I think Scorpio saw too much of The Hunger Games before the apocalypse started.”
“I’m sorry,” Chris said. “Who’s Scorpio?”
“Scorpio is the leader here, of the Reavers.”
“Reavers? Did I slip into a nightmare?”
“Sort of. Scorpio, and everyone who follows her, believes she is immune. To demonstrate her powers she arranges these events to keep everyone distracted from the tyrannical way she leads us. It reminds everyone of what will happen to them if they don’t follow the rules. They’ll end up in here like the rest of us.”
“Is she immune?” Chris said.
Zora shrugged.
“She claims to be,” she said. “She’s never proved she wasn’t.”
Zora saw Maisie and smiled.
“Hello, little one,” she said.
With a flick of her eyes she looked up at Chris.
“She’s beautiful,” she said. “You ought to take good care of her.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do, but for some reason we’re now stuck in here. What will they do with us?”
“This society exists with everyone having a purpose, fulfilling a function. Once that function no longer exists they are sacrificed. Take a look around,” she said, nodding to the others in the cage. “Old people, invalids, and children. The man in the wheelchair used to fix watches. They say he was one of the best watchmakers in the world. Parents were Swiss. But now time doesn’t mean anything. One day rolls into the next and who cares what time it is? The old couple in the corner there were bakers. They had their own bakeries in London. Very wealthy, very privileged, but here, we barely have enough food to go around. Bread is a luxury. It’s too intensive to make and so they are sacrificed. Everyone here has a story, and they all end in tragedy.”
“What about her?” Chris said, nodding to the woman standing at the end of the cage, fingers poking through the holes in the fence. “Why is she here?”
“Some people are physically weak, others mentally. She’s one of the latter. She believes we should give ourselves to our masters – the zombies. She’ll be the first to die.”
Chris peered around at the crazy woman’s face. She had a distant smile on her face, as if she were looking at something only she could see, and she liked it. Chris took an unconscious step back.
“They are our saviours,” the crazy woman said with a wide grin, not taking her eyes off the horizon. “Finally I shall join them in glorious death and resurrection.”
“I’m scared,” Maisie said, hugging Chris’s leg.
“I know, Mais,” Chris said. “I am too.”
“Maisie,” George said, “can you tell me what your favourite colour is?”
“Yellow,” Maisie said.
“Just ‘yellow’? No specific shade?”
“Sherbet lemon yellow,” she said.
“Favourite toy?”
“Mario Kart.”
“Where do you live?”
“Usher’s farm. With Dad and you.”
Maisie took deep calming breaths between each answer, her shoulders relaxing.
“Favourite TV show?” George said.
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
Chris smiled his thanks to George.
“What are we going to be sacrificed to, exactly?” Chris said to Zora.
“Zombies, of course. We’re just a sideshow, a way for Scorpio to keep a tight leash on her subjects here. They all know what’s going on, but so long as these sacrifices continue, and there’s the threat they could get thrown in here, no one rebels.”
“And why are you here?”
“I was subversive. I tried to get the others to rebel. Instead, I was betrayed, caught and sent here. You’re about to enter a world where survival is an art form.”
“What do you mean?”
Zora turned to the front of the cage that led out onto a green field.
“We will be released from here and forced to fight a horde of zombies. And each time we fight there must be at least one survivor, either human or zombie. I’ve survived seven times. Everyone else is dead.”
“Why do they do this?”
“To keep the peace. To ensure everyone knows their place. To make sure no one rebels, and everyone fulfils their function. But there’s another benefit to all this. The zombies are no longer monsters here to kill us, they are an amusement. They become less dangerous in the eyes of the spectators. People are less afraid, and they feel they’re less afraid thanks to Scorpio’s regime here. If you want to stay alive you have only one option: survive. If we’re going to stand a chance of living through this, we’re going to have to work together. I’ve seen what they throw at us and it isn’t pretty.”
“Is there no way to escape?”
“Not that I can think of.”
Chris shook his head.
“We haven’t got time for this,” he said. “We need to get out of here.”
“They won’t let you go,” Zora said.
“But we can’t stay here.”
“Then you need to come up with a plan to escape, and fast. They’ll blow the horn soon, and then they’ll open the gate. There’ll be little time for plans when you’re fighting for your life.”
Chris gripped the cage wall with his fingers and shook it with an aggression and venom he’d rarely felt, drawing the attention of the other prisoners. He let out a roar of frustration and then laid his forehead on the interlocking metal latticework.
“Have you finished?” Zora said. “Because if you’re done wasting time having a breakdown I can tell you how to survive out there.”
Chris’s body shivered with pent up rage. He took a deep breath and let it out.
“Fine,” he said. “How do we survive?”
“When they open these gates we must hurry to the centre of the stadium,” Zora said. “Grab whatever weapons you can and then run to one of the towers, although they’re more like shacks than towers. There are four in total, each one in a corner of the field,” she said, pointing them out. “There are also two large sand traps across the middle of the pitch and spikes sticking out of the walls. Obviously you want to avoid them as much as possible.”
Chris looked out through the fence at the field before them, and for the first time realised what it was. It had not been kept in good condition. The grass was worn through in many places.
“It used to be a football stadium,” Zora said. “Now they’ve turned it into a kind of temple.”
“I know some people who used to think of it as a temple before this all kicked off. Look, thanks for your advice, but really, we just want to get out of here.”
“We all do,” Zora said. “If you can survive till the end of the match at least then you can survive for another day.”
“A day’s too long,” Chris said with an eye toward Maisie. “We need to get out of here now.”
“Until this cage door opens and those zombies start piling in, we aren’t going anywhere.”
Chris leaned his head against the fence, letting the links dig into his skin.
“There must be a way,” he said under his breath. “There has to be. What happens at the end of the fight?”
“If the zombies win, then we all die. If we win, we have to kill all the zombies.”
“Then what?”
“Then they take us back to our cells to fight again tomorrow.”
Chris frowned.
“What happens to all the bodies in the stadium?” he said.
“The cleaners come and take them away.”
“To where?”
“A big quarry down the road. They burn them.”
“And as soon as the fight’s over, everyone returns home?”